iPhone 5 Tops Early Nexus 4 Benchmarks Posted by AnandTech

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iPhone 5 Tops Early Nexus 4 Benchmarks Posted by AnandTech

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This week Google announced a refresh to their hardware line up and unveiled the Nexus 4 smartphone and Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets. The Nexus 4 is made by LG and sports a 4.7 inch screen that rivals the industry standard Retina display (326 ppi) when it comes to pixels per inch with 320.

AnandTech has posted some early benchmarks of the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 and within the results you can see the iPhone 5 has a leg up in certain browser tests used to measure CPU performance, such as this SunSpider test below:

The iPhone 5 also outperforms the Nexus 4 in numerous GPU and display tests, such as this one via GLBenchmark 2.5:

The iPhone 5 Retina display tops the Nexus 4 when it comes to brightness tests for whites (but not blacks) but is edged out in contrast tests.

The most interesting results were the battery life tests. As you may recall Google decided to forego LTE with the Nexus 4 and stuck with 3G HSPA+ instead.

In Wi-Fi tests, the iPhone 5 blew away the Nexus 4, but the cellular data tests are the most surprising. The iPhone 5 on LTE lasted for more than 8 hours, almost doubling the battery performance of the Nexus 4 on 3G:

These impressive iPhone 5 battery results are a testament to Apple’s engineers and how they been able to work on the efficiency of their A6 SoC in tandem with iOS, something that is frequently understated. They’ve crammed a large battery inside a thin and light smartphone that still outperforms the larger 4.7 inch Nexus 4, which Google claims is the fastest phone on the planet.

The Nexus 4 does have an attractive $299 unlocked price for the 8GB model, available in Canada soon on November 13th–it’s also the fastest (and only) way for Android users to get access to the latest OS from Google without dealing with carriers.

You can check out the early results of AnandTech’s early benchmarks here. What did you think of these first tests?

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To whoever is getting eight hours in Safari on their iPhone 5 in LTE, can I have it? I get more like 5-6 hrs of usage period! With LTE, Wifi and Bluetooth turned off. I just switched my iPhone out for a third time at the store hopefully fixing the issue as one day my old phone died in about 4hrs.

Niven

What a bogus bunch of crap

shawn J

Get a Samsung…and good luck with it.

johntech

Apple’s iPhone 5 is indeed the fastest smartphone available in the market today. It bests every other high-end Android smartphone ; doesn’t matter if they come with four cores or are clocked at higher frequencies.Even with 2 GB ram and 1.5 quad core android can come close !

ChristieNooks

Wow talk about cherrypicking benchmarks. Sunspider is borderline meaningless. The Nexus 4 has DOUBLE the RAM. And by far the most meaningful difference is the Nexus 4 having a MUCH more powerful CPU.

CPU is far more important in a smartphone than the GPU. The CPU handles almost everything – The OS, your vids, the browser, all your Apps ect. The GPU is only for games.

ChristieNooks

You are ofcourse completely wrong. There are many smartphones with a more powerful CPU than the iphone5, such as the international Galaxy S3, the Note II, the Optimus G and the Nexus 4.

Rupert Norris

“it’s also the fastest (and only) way for Android users to get access to the latest OS from Google without dealing with carriers” Why did you say this?! That is completely false.

Gotta love all the android fanboys talking down the iPhone any chance they get .

Randy Ritraj

You are of course even more completely wrong. Your definition of “a more powerful CPU” is one with a higher clock speed. That is what the uneducated believe. There’s a lot more that goes into a CPU’s speed than just the clock cycle. For example, take a 1.5GHz CPU with 2MB of cache and benchmark it against a 1.3GHz CPU with 8MB of cache – see which one is faster. The iPhone 5 is the fastest phone – others have faster CPUs but their overall architecture doesn’t keep up.

Cordova Bay

I think the tests released so far show the iPhone 5 (with Apple’s A6 CPU) is faster than all the other competitors in the market.

As far as specs go, they are very misleading unless you understand the inner workings of the CPU itself.

The ARM instruction set (Apple do not use ARM designs with the A6/A6X but do use their instruction set) is RISC architecture. That means data throughput is extremely important to the overall speed of the CPUs using it. However, the speed issues are associated with pipelines, branch prediction, ordered vs unordered execution, instruction and data caches and a number of other things that overshadow clock speed. If you can fetch 8 instructions per clock cycle vs a standard 4 instructions you have a major potential gain (branch prediction comes into play there).

But, even if iOS and Android run on the exact same hardware, iOS should be faster. While both use native ARM instruction code for the OS, Android uses JAVA VM running JAVA code for all applications vs iOS that sees applications using native ARM instructions. This means Android needs more memory and a bit more horsepower just to stay even.

With Apple now optimizing the hardware with the software, the speed differential should increase over time with new releases of both CPUs and OSes.

foams

Your refusal to see the facts and accept them defies even further logic that all Android users only shop on glittery specs alone and would be easily suckered into buying the worst junk out there only because its crammed with every hope-something-brilliant- sticks feature built ontop of iOS, wait I mean: OSX. It’s big brother waiting for “Sammy” to REALLY start a tech fight.

iOS is very light and fast and Android just can’t throw enough haymakers trying to take Apple down. 1-billion swings, misses and counting..

It’s Ok to like something over something else, but to brag that Android hardware/UI is epic and dwarfs Apple is ignoring reality and playing on typical limited knowledge. Just because mass distribution figures for Samsung/Android are great doesn’t = actual activation stats either.

briggy

Weird. Have 3 iphones sitting in a drawer because I’m tired of slow hardware after upgrades. Guess I just love all my android toys. What do you have to say about that, know it all?

For everyone you counter, your ramblings are easily countered.

I’ll let you go, probably still trying to figure out how to change your default browser to chrome.

briggy

I own 3. I can talk down these pieces of crap all I want.

Randy Ritraj

So what you’re saying is that you didn’t learn the first two times?

sean

I don’t even care if the iphone is faster at this, or that. What I do care about is the battery life. So far I’m not real happy with what I’ve seen on reviews. Come on Google … I really wanted to like this phone. I can live without LTE, and sd card, but I’m NOT interested in having to charge this phone all the time.

Flinton

I’ll never understand why anyone would care about specific benchmarks for a Smartphone – it really doesn’t make any sense. While its nice to load pages more quickly, I’m not sure the difference in loading of 500 ms really makes much of a difference. Also, as an application provider, I’ll develop for the lowest common denominator – not the Enzo of the Smartphone class.

People seem to continue to get crazy about this Android vs iOS vs BB vs MS discussion – but let me ask a SINGLE question.

Is there a phone that can do something that another phone can’t do? I can run a browser, read email, Evernote, Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, read office documents, run a multitude of applications simultaneously, play games on any of the phones listed above. I’ve had a smartphone since 1998 and not much has changed in that time – the device is as useful as you are.

Stop cluttering up the internet and comment sections with your iOS vs Android vs BB crap (Cordova Boy excluded). People may one day actually look at a comment section for information instead of some fanboy struggling with their engrish.

PhoneUser

These tests were done on a pre-release of 4.2.

Congrats, Apple thinks they win… again…

Apple might own patents for this… should keep my mouth shut..

phak

you guys are all missing the point, the key here is the price. the cheapest nexus 4($299) is less than half the price of the cheapest iphone5($649). sure the internet is a bit slower,so waht? you just saved over $300 bucks which you can spend a year later towards your new smart phone

True. Google’s unlocked pricing is aggressive and impressive. But will consumers see that?
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Gary Ng

Jon1123

they disected the a6 snapdragon krait and exynos 5 cortex a15.(they being anadtech). they found that the a6 (on an architectural level) was similar to the krait and the a15 in the front end but had a less complex back end. they also found that wile its memory interface was nice it wasnt even close to the a15 but hovered close to the krait. and lets not forget that these benchmarks were done on preproduction devices. the s4 and exynos 5 are the fastest on the market wit gpu’s second only to the ipad 4…(look at more than t/s and pixels/s)

wuthephuk

“But will consumers see that?”

Are you that ignorant or just can’t find anything better to say? Price is probably the most important factor for many people, especially in this economy.

Was referring to whether customers would be able to see the ‘deal’ from Google here. The average Joe won’t hear about this because all they know how to do is buy smartphones in-store and get conned by the sales associates there.
The ‘average’ consumer is still addicted to $0-199 smartphones on three year contracts. They won’t fork out over $300 for an unlocked phone because they can’t resist carrier subsidies and retentions.
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Gary Ng